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Making Multiracials

Stanford University Press

Contents

Tables, Figures, and Photos....................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments................................................................................................................................xi1 Introduction.................................................................................................................................12 The Making of a Category.....................................................................................................................213 Becoming a Multiracial Entrepreneur: Four Stories............................................................................................474 Making Multiracial Families..................................................................................................................865 Creating Multiracial Identity and Community..................................................................................................1256 Consuming Multiracials.......................................................................................................................1547 Redrawing the Color Line?: The Problems and Possibilities of Multiracial Families and Group Making...........................................173Appendix A List of Respondents.................................................................................................................193Appendix B Methodology.........................................................................................................................196Appendix C Situating Multiracial Group Making in the Literature on Social Movements, Race, and the Work of Pierre Bourdieu.....................207Notes..........................................................................................................................................217Bibliography...................................................................................................................................231Index..........................................................................................................................................251

Chapter One

IN 1993 THE U.S. HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel held hearings to discuss the racial and ethnic categories to be used in the 2000 census. Committee members were concerned with whether the racial and ethnic classifications established in 1977 were still adequate for counting America's population. At these hearings, many groups challenged the ways the state classified them. The National Council of La Raza, for example, proposed including Hispanic/Latino as a racial designation while Native Hawaiians proposed being counted as Native Americans. Yet the most explosive challenge came from a putatively new contender in America's ongoing racial debate: the multiracial community.

In 1993 the federal racial classification system reflected a uniquely American understanding of race in which individuals were allowed to choose one and only one race. The only choice available to those who did not feel the available categories described them was "other," a catch-all category that critics said conveyed little meaning. Multiracial representatives argued for a mode of categorization that acknowledged multiple ancestry-either a simple "multiracial" check box or the possibility of checking all applicable racial categories. Unlike groups requesting a shuffling of their placement within the existing racial framework, self-identified multiracials claimed to be a formerly unrecognized group challenging the framework itself.

From the vantage point of 2007, it is perhaps difficult to recapture the novelty of multiracial activists' claims. When representatives of the Association of Multiethnic Americans made their claims for official enumeration of mixed race people in 1993, "multiracial" as a basis of collective identification did not exist outside of a few local community groups. Before those hearings there was virtually no broad public awareness of multiracial collective organizing, even among the people multiracial organizers claimed to represent. With a few notable exceptions, scholars were unaware of or uninterested in such organizing, perhaps best exemplified in F. James Davis's contention (as late as 1991) that the so-called one-drop rule (the practice of defining as black persons with any known African ancestry, no matter how little) would remain unchallenged for the foreseeable future. Much has changed since then.

Despite Davis's prediction, the one-drop rule has been challenged. Largely due to the efforts of multiracial activists, in 1997 the U.S. Census Bureau changed its racial enumeration policy to allow individuals to "mark one or more" racial categories. With that decision, the federal government (hereafter referred to as the state) resumed counting mixed race populations in Census 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau 2002), something it had not done in nearly eighty years.

When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods told Oprah Winfrey and her television audience of the name he came up with to convey all aspects of his racial identity ("cablinasian" for Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian), it seemed an idiosyncratic and highly individualized identity. By 2003, a Sunday New York Times article declared the arrival of "Generation E. A." (ethnically ambiguous). Whole generations, not just Tiger it would seem, were claiming to be-and being recognized as-mixed race.

Dominant attitudes about racial mixing have shifted as well. Not until 2004 was it widely revealed that Strom Thurmond, the staunch segregationist senator from South Carolina, had fathered a daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, with his family's teenage black maid. Ms. Washington-Williams's paternity was kept secret for over seventy-eight years until she revealed it shortly after her father's death. Both father and daughter understood that revealing their relationship would end his political career. In contrast, for Barack Obama-currently the only U.S. senator of African descent-racial mixedness is showcased in the crafting of his public persona, not hidden or downplayed. In his address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama made explicit reference to his biraciality (he is the son of a black Kenyan economist and white mother from Kansas). He has since been touted as a viable future presidential candidate and his biraciality depicted as a key reason why he will heal political division.

In other words, over the last decade multiracialism has emerged as a topic of public discussion, and "multiracial" has become a recognizable social category and mode of identification. In the 1990s, organizations for interracial families and mixed race people were loosely organized, only partially aware of each other, and relatively short-lived. While many remain short-lived, collective organizing by people identifying as multiracial has continued, has become more interconnected, and has entered new institutional domains. What was once largely ignored (how the children of interracial unions identify racially), treated as taboo (interracial sex and intimacy), or thought not to exist (multiracial community) is now receiving considerable attention and becoming part of the...